The Bridge Erie's Bike Shop Bet On Before the Town Even Finished It
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Thursday evenings in Erie used to mean a decision. Drive to the farmers market on Briggs Street, find parking somewhere near Wells or Moffat, then decide whether the trip was worth circling the block twice. If you lived on the Colliers Hill side of Coal Creek, that decision came with an extra ten minutes each way.
This summer, that decision mostly disappeared. On May 16, Erie opened Colliers Crossing, a 225-foot pedestrian bridge over Coal Creek that finally links Colliers Hill directly to Historic Downtown. The ribbon-cutting started at 10 a.m. on the east side of the creek, and the first group to walk across didn't stop at the trailhead. They kept going, straight into the 29th Annual Town Fair already underway in Old Town. That timing wasn't an accident. It was the town telling residents, in the most literal way possible, what this bridge is for.
Erie has talked about trail connectivity for years. What's different now is that the talk turned into a single, specific structure that closes a real gap. Before May, getting from the Colliers Hill side of the creek to Old Town on foot or by bike meant a longer detour around Coal Creek Park rather than through it. The new bridge, built as part of the town's broader Coal Creek Expansion Project, removes that detour entirely. It ties into the Colliers Hill Spine Trail on one side and drops walkers and riders straight into the downtown trail network on the other.
The Town of Erie's project page frames it as a way to reach downtown "without the need for a car," which sounds like standard planning language until you notice how many existing amenities that sentence quietly connects. This is a corridor that already had a farmers market, a disc golf course, and a dog park sitting on it. The bridge didn't create new destinations. It made the destinations that were already there reachable from a part of town that used to be cut off.
Here's the detail that tells you more than the ribbon-cutting does. CyclErie, the town's only dedicated bike shop, doubled the size of its showroom at 515 Briggs Street in January 2026, four months before the bridge opened. The shop sits close enough to Coal Creek Park that customers can walk a new eBike out the door and onto the trail within a hundred yards, and owner Dan Johnson has described the location as the only shop on the Front Range where a test ride connects straight to Coal Creek Trail or, about ten minutes further out, to Erie Singletrack for mountain and eMTB testing.
A shop doesn't expand its floor space for eBikes, cargo bikes, and kids' models on a hunch. It expands because the people who watch trail usage numbers and town construction timelines for a living already knew what was coming. CyclErie built out inventory for a bridge that hadn't opened yet, which says something about how confidently local businesses were reading the town's own construction schedule. When the bridge did open, the shop wasn't reacting to new demand. It was already stocked for it.
Part of why this bridge matters more than a typical infrastructure update is that the trail it connects to wasn't empty before. The Coal Creek Open Space corridor already threads together Coal Creek Park, Lehigh Park, Reliance Park, and Serene Park, along with two other properties that don't show up in most visitor guides: Boneyard Dog Park and the Coal Creek Disc Golf Course.
The disc golf course is worth a specific mention because it's the kind of amenity locals use constantly and visitors never hear about. It's 18 holes, free to play, open sunrise to sunset, and recognized by the Professional Disc Golf Association. You can reach it from Erie Parkway, from the trail itself, or on foot from Coal Creek Park or Serene Park. Before Colliers Crossing, a resident on the Colliers Hill side who wanted an evening round had to drive around to one of those access points. Now it's a trail walk.
Boneyard Dog Park sits on the same open space system, which means the corridor was already handling foot traffic, dog walkers, and disc golfers well before it became a commuter shortcut. The bridge didn't add capacity to an empty trail. It added a missing link to a corridor that was already busy.
The Erie Farmers Market runs Thursdays from 5 to 8 p.m. on Briggs Street between Wells and Moffat, and this season closes on September 17. That leaves five more Thursdays, counting this week, before the market packs up for the year. If you've been meaning to try the car-free version of that Thursday errand, this is close to the last stretch of warm-weather evenings to do it.
A version of that evening might look like this if you're coming from the Colliers Hill side:
None of that requires a car, and none of it required the bridge to exist as recently as this spring.
The bridge isn't the last piece. The town's Coal Creek Expansion Project has already turned to its next phase, a new bridge planned at County Line Road and Kenosha Road, expected to begin construction later in 2026. That project sits farther from Old Town, but it points to the same pattern. Erie isn't building isolated crossings. It's closing gaps in a corridor that already connects parks, a dog park, a disc golf course, and now two neighborhoods that used to require a car to reach each other.
For residents, the practical upshot is simple. The trail behind your house or across the street from your subdivision is worth checking again, even if you stopped thinking of it as a real route months ago. The map changed in May, and the businesses that pay closest attention to foot and bike traffic already adjusted for it.
If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is actually worth now that the bridge has closed the gap, or you're curious how trail access like this tends to show up in what buyers look for, The Sledge Team knows this stretch of Northern Colorado well enough to walk you through it, no pressure required.
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